Every year, on the weekend before the 4th of July, our family throws a party. In addition to a great selection of food, the party usually involves a big water ballon fight, various beers on tap, and a fireworks show that wow's the crowd. Every year we hire out for food though; we often have chicken entrees, sushi, sandwich trays and potato salads or similar catered food. Once we splurged and had someone roast a pig, but we decided that was too expensive. All of our family agreed though that we had the best experience at last year's party when we had a clambake celebration.

If you have a catered party in the summer like ours, I think you should have the caterers serve seafood. You are going to spend a good sum of money on catering, and for just a little bit more money, you could serve interesting seafood rather than the run-of-the mill catered food like chicken and macaroni that you often find at these events.

A couple hundred people often show up for our Independence day celebrations. Not all of the people show up at the same time, but they come and go over the course of the party, and I guess that 200 or more show up every year. For a successful clambake celebration, you ought to have at least 40 people show up. If you don't have that many people, you may find that you end up having too much stuff and not enough participants. When there are enough participants, it would be worthwhile to have a clambake celebration.

The clambake celebration that we hosted was obviously through a catering company. We ordered a full menu, including clams, mussels, lobsters, and quahogs. They bring over live lobster, and kill/cook them in front of you. Half of the fun (both for the children and the adults) is to watch the showmanship of the chefs doing this. They also have a lot of rocks and seafood laid out that they serve the food on top of.

We went with the "standard clambake", but optional, a "New England clambake" was also available. The price was similar, the difference was probably a more local tweak to the New England version. The one we ordered was delicious, but I wish I could compare the two. I might go with the other option the next time we eat clambake.

We are glad to announce this years clambake celebration party on July 4th. The planing has been done already, we can't wait for it to be July! Serving clambake was such a success last year and we expect the same for this independence day. Make sure not to miss the fireworks and the water balloon fight! There will be plenty of beer.